Truth on Trial – Meta & Alphabet Trial 2026: Rebuilding Trust in Uncertain Times Part 3
The following article is written by Max Jeganathan, author and speaker at OCCA, The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.
New news and ancient truth
Historic civil lawsuits successfully brought against Meta – the company that owns Facebook, and Alphabet – the company that owns YouTube – reflects important aspects of truth, morality, justice and human nature – to which we should all pay close attention.
In one case – handed down by the First Judicial District Court of New Mexico in the United States – a verdict against Meta was found to the tune of USD$375 million, brought by that state’s Government. Meta was found to be negligent in endangering children and exposing them to unsafe interactions and potential exploitation.
In another trial, the Los Angeles County Superior Court found in favour of a young woman, led by American lawyer and guest speaker at The OCCA Mark Lanier, awarding her USD$6 million by way of the negligence of Meta and Alphabet, in light of her compulsive addiction to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. This marks a significant moment in the latest stage of the technology revolution – with growing concerns about technology’s impact on people and increasingly evident need for greater responsibility to be placed on technology companies.
These cases are historic, but corporate negligence is not new. The late British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge remarked that all new news is just old news happening to new people. The latest round of our technological revolution is yielding unprecedented change, but it continues to reflect perpetual struggles and human realities that we have been grappling with for millennia.
We are more connected than ever before. More of our lives are digitalised and electronically integrated. Our phones are smarter. Our computers are faster. And the rise of artificial intelligence marks the onset of perhaps the most significant chapter of industrial change in human history.
However, our deepest human needs remain constant.
We might be cooking with different ingredients, but we are still searching for recipes that reflect the same longings: truth, stability, identity, and fulfilment.
These court decisions mark a watershed moment not only in relation to the onset of artificial intelligence and social media, but in relation to our struggle to make sense of a rapidly changing world alongside our hunger for truth, justice and fairness. It has been reported that more than 100 similar cases are underway, against Meta and Alphabet. In June, another key case against social media companies is due to come before a Federal Court in California. The world will be watching.
The legal duty of care: A signal of transcendence?
The larger case against Meta was brought under New Mexico’s consumer protection law – a civil framework designed to protect consumers from unconscionable, unfair and unlawful corporate practices. The case focused on the failure of Meta – specifically through its apps Facebook and Instagram – to protect children from sexual exploitation and to properly communicate the risks of harm to its users. The second case – handed down in Los Angeles – related to the negligence of both Meta and Alphabet, in relation to social media addiction.
Importantly, the cases were decided by a jury – reflecting the reality that concerns about truth, justice and technology are not niche issues confined to the purview of the legal community or the intelligentsia, but everyday people.
Families, schools and governments have seen the science, and the jury is no longer out. A mainstream consensus is solidifying, on the harms of social media and on the moral negligence of large technology companies.
This growing public consensus has been bolstered by everyone from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, community activists, academics, parents who have lost children to suicide, and popular scholarship by thinkers like social psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt (most recently through his bestselling book The Anxious Generation). Governments have been legislating age restrictions on social media use. Parliaments have been interrogating technology CEOs. And social media companies have been on the ropes for the past 24 months.
But how does this all fit into the age-old human longing for justice and our call to care for one another?
Almost 100 years ago, a woman found a snail in an opaque bottle of ginger beer. She sued and won. The case – Donoghue V Stevenson – was a watershed moment for what we now know to be the legal principle that protects people against the negligence of others: The Duty of Care. It marked a key moment in the judicial establishment of this duty, that all citizens – including corporate citizens – owe to one another. And perhaps it pointed to something beyond us.
The recognition of a higher moral law
The civil duty of care that was on display in those New Mexico and Los Angeles courtrooms will be stress-tested to no end as our information, communications and artificial intelligence revolutions continue. But it’s important to remember that we can track our call to care for one another to long before that snail was found in that bottle. At its core, what western legal systems now refer to as the civil duty of care is simply a modern take on the ancient Christian call for people for love their neighbours. Long before modern common law emerged, the Bible had already articulated its moral foundations. Today, billions of people live under the protection of political and legal systems that reflect those principles.
It’s not just truth that is on trial in courtrooms around the world. And it won’t just be truth that is on trial in the hundreds of similar ‘technological negligence’ cases which will inevitably be brought before courts all over the world in the coming years. It is that our hunger for justice points to the existence of a higher moral truth that people of all faiths and no faith instinctively grasp for.
The digitalisation and technologisation of our world have increased the potential for harm that we may cause one another, but it doesn’t seem to have eroded the ideals that seem to be written on every human heart.
When big tech companies get rich on the backs of vulnerable people and deploy business models that yield incredible profits at the expense of individuals, we know something is not right.
Perhaps this instinct is a symptom and a memory trace of something beyond us – something good and true and beautiful, something that is worthy of greater investigation.
We instinctively react not only against corporate and commercial exploitation, but all exploitation. We rise up when the vulnerable suffer at the hands of the powerful. The verdicts that called into question the behaviour of these giant companies offer just a glimpse of the deeper principles at play in our hearts, minds and institutions.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about the power of those principles and about that to which they point. The existence of an objective truth, an objective standard of care, compassion and morality, speak to exactly what the Christian Bible has asserted for millennia: The duty of care that all people owe to one another. The moral violation of exploiting the vulnerable for profit. The need for those with power authority and influence to be held to account for their actions. All of these things flow from a Judeo-Christian moral framework. As the atheist thinker Jurgen Habermas put it, the modern world owes its entire system of ethics and morality to the Jewish ideal of justice and the Christian ideal of love.
The Search for Truth
In many ways, the growing consensus against the influence and profitability of big technology companies affirms the unworkability of relativism – the increasingly obsolete idea that people should be allowed to decide what is true for themselves. We were told for many years that good and evil were whatever we wanted it to be. Yet our history shows that injustice often yields a consensus of opposition. The abolition of slavery. Legal protections for children. Humane standards for workers. Human rights. The freedoms of speech thought and conscience. The outcry against sexual harassment and abuse. These are all phenomena that would not be possible – or coherent – unless there was a pre- supposed acceptance of an objective moral truth that sat outside of human opinion, culture and time.
As has been said by many Christian thinkers over the years – none more eloquently than C.S. Lewis – hunger for something points to the likeliness of the existence of that which satisfies that hunger. Accordingly, our search for truth and justice suggests that an objective basis for truth and justice exists. Importantly – and in contrast to the foundational claims of postmodern thinking – these things exist outside of us and beyond the reaches of human preferences or speculation.
So how do we find them? How should we investigate the biggest truth claims of all?
In the final part of this series, ‘Rebuilding Trust in Uncertain Times’, we will explore how legal reasoning, evidence and the trial of Jesus himself, may help us think about truth, belief and the biggest questions of all.
Learning More
OCCA The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics was established in 2004 to raise up the next generation of evangelist-apologists. By 2021, around 350 emerging evangelists from around the world had studied on the OCCA one-year programme. This course equipped each of them to share and defend the gospel message and to come alongside others to help them with their intellectual objections and heartfelt concerns about the Christian faith. Subscribe to our weekly newsletters to see our latest articles from our team of speakers.
Max Jeganathan